Republicanism in Ireland, edited by Fearghal McGarry, University College

Dublin Press, 2003, pages 145-166

A Nation Once Again

Towards an Epistemology of the Republican Imaginaire

And Ireland long a province be

A nation once again

Perhaps the first things that need to be addressed, given the title of this paper, are the

terms ‘republican’ and ‘imaginaire’. The former term would seem to be self evident, in

that it generically describes a political system wherein power within a state is held by

the people, through their representatives. It also refers to a political system where there

is a separation of power between the legislature and the judiciary. The two great

republican examples are those of the American and French revolutions wherrein a

military overthrow of a political regime was accompanied by an intellectual and

philosophical interrogation of notions of power and responsibility.

The genesis of the term ‘republicanism,’ in a specifically Irish context, can be

traced to the period antedating 1798. Republicanism has remained a potent signifier in

subsequent Irish politics, and is still relevant today in the form of the Provisional Irish

Republican Army, Provisional Sinn Féin, the Continuity IRA, the Real IRA and the 32

County Sovereignty Committee. Ironically, the motto of the Provisionals, ‘tiocfaidh ár

lá’, translates as ‘our day will come’, and this is the exact phrase that is used by Davin

in his conversation with Stephen in Chapter Five of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man. As Stephen runs through the history of failed rebellions of the past, and states his

1
refusal to join any such movement, Davin replies: they ‘died for their ideals,

Stevie….Our day will come yet, believe me’.[1] This verbal parallelism foregrounds

the thematic and imagistic dimensions of Republican ideology as we have come to

know it. Literary tropes are suasively used in order to reinforce a motivated connection

between a particular group, a whole nation and notions of temporal closure: ‘a nation

once again’.

The imaginaire, on the other hand, is a term specific to the theory of the French

psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. It is seen as the first order of development of the human

ego, before progressing into the area of what he calls the symbolic, namely the register of

language, symbols and agreed systems of meaning. In a ground-breaking essay entitled

‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’,[2] Lacan sees one of the seminal

stages of this ‘construct’ as the defining of the self in terms of a reflection. The self is

defined in terms of a misrecognition (méconaissance) of an image of itself in the mirror, a

process which he terms the ‘mirror stage.’ While initially seen as a moment which can be

placed at a particular time in a child’s life, between six and eighteen months, Lacan

would later see this as a structural relationship vital to the formation of the ego.

This paper extrapolates this position into a societal and group matrix. The

Lacanian imaginary is taken here as a model which can encompass the epistemological

structure of republicanism in particular as a form or sub-set of nationalism. I will explore

the nature of Lacan’s concept of the imaginary order before applying it to the

construction of a republican idea of selfhood. I am aware that Lacan’s theories are

essentially based on the individual self, but would contend that there is theoretical

justification in applying them to a more societal or group concept of identity. In

2
Althusserian terms, society interpellates the next generation in its own image through

socio-cultural and linguistic signifiers, and the epistemological structure of republican

nationalism is suffused with such structures, and has successfully replicated itself in

various individuals over a long period of time. Lacan’s theories of the creation of the

individual self through a form of reflection would certainly seem to have some place in

such structures.

In this essay, Lacan pictures a child becoming aware of its own image in a mirror,

and goes on to discuss the ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child’ as it

aspires to the totality of that image:[3]

This…would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which

the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its
function as subject. This form would have to be called the Ideal-I.[4]

The important point to note about this identification is that the image is ideal, it orients

the ‘agency of the ego’ in a ‘fictional direction’; it is something towards which the ego

may aspire, but which it can never attain. It is also an identification that has no place for

anything else outside of its scopic field (the field where the visual dimension of desire is

enacted). Lacan makes the point that the human ego is created as a result of identifying

with one’s own specular image, so what seems to be individual, internal and unique to the

individual is, in fact, the result of an identification with a two-dimensional representation

of that individual. The ‘ideal-I’ is both a fiction, and a fixed model which can never be

more fully developed.

Samuel Weber comments astutely on one particular aspect of this theory. He

notes that a human being is able, at a much earlier stage: ‘to perceive the unity of an

image than it is to produce this unity in its own body’.[5] The difficulty here is that the

3
image is both that of the self, and also a form of alterity, in that it is clearly not the self.

The recognition of the self is actually a misrecognition, but one which exerts a powerful

hold on the ego, as it provides the comforting sense of wholeness which the ego desires.

This prefigures an allied sense of alienation from the image, as feelings of narcissistic

aggressivity arise in the tension between the specular image and the real body. In other

words, through the agency of desire, the human child sees an image that is more coherent

than the actuality of its own body and proceeds to identify with it. This is then taken as

an image of our lifelong need to be better than we are. So, we see ourselves, ideally, as

thinner, cleverer, more successful, more populr than we actually are.

Interestingly, Weber situates such conflicts in terms of temporality. He makes the

point that for Lacan, the future anterior is of crucial importance in his discussion of the

construction of identity, as it is through time that such notions are developed. Lacan

himself stressed the importance of the future anterior in his own discussion on language

and time:

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is
realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or
even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of
what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.[6]

Lacan, Weber notes, locates the time of the subject as an ‘inconclusive futurity of what

will-always-already-have-been...a “time” which can never be entirely remembered, since

it will never have fully taken place’.[7] In other words, in the mirror stage, the

identification of the subject with the imago[8] sets up a desire for imaginary wholeness in

the future, a future towards which the subject strives, but which it will never reach.

Hence, Lacan’s vision of the imago as an ‘alienating destination,’ which is reached by

facing towards a ‘fictional direction’,[9] wherein the specular image ‘traps the subject in

4
an illusory ideal of completeness’.[10] This ongoing process of captation and

misrecognition is a performative through which the ego is created and defined. For

Lacan, narcissistic aggressivity is the result of a desire that can never be fulfilled. Before

desire can be mediated through language and the symbolic order, it: ‘exists solely in the

single plane of the imaginary relation of the specular stage, projected, alienated in the

other’.[11]

What we see in Lacan’s investigation of the mirror stage, then, is that he radically

transformed a psychological experiment into a ‘theory of the imaginary organisation of

the human subject’.[12] This stress on the imaginary as a structural ordering of human

relationships is important in our discussion of nationalism. It begins in the mirror stage,

but continues into all aspects of our lives. Elizabeth Grosz provides a comprehensive

overview of the imaginary:

Imaginary relations are thus two-person relations, where the self sees itself reflected
in the other. This dual imaginary relation...although structurally necessary, is an
ultimately stifling and unproductive relation. The dual relationship between mother
and child is a dyad [two individuals regarded as a pair], trapping both participants
within a mutually defining structure. Each strives to have the other, and ultimately,
to be the other in a vertiginous spiral from one term or identity to the other.[13]

Here, we see the symphysis between the Lacanian imaginary and the

epistemology of nationalism in general and republicanism in particular. At a basic level,

this reflective captation of the subject by an image is what constitutes the imaginary

order. Imaginary relationships are predominated by ambivalent emotions; a desire to

become the image in the mirror, and, on realising the futility of this aim, a resultant

aggressivity towards both the image, and anything which intervenes with, or blocks, the

desired identification with that image. The image, as well as being a source of desire, is

also, because it is fictional as well as external and can never be fully internalised, a

5
source of hatred. The displacement of this hatred on all that is deemed to be outside this

binary specular relationship is a possible explanation of the violence that seems to be

inherent in practically all enunciations of nationalist ideology throughout history. The

primary imaginary relationship for the ego is with the mother. Child and mother are seen

as a unity, a biologically centred reaction as, of course, child and mother were a single

entity during pregnancy

I will contend that this captation of the self by a reflected, two-dimensional

image of that self, is the sine qua non of the epistemology of nationalism and

Republicanism. An image of selfhood is set up as an ideal, an ideal which has a dual

interaction with the temporal structures of history. The mirror in question here is one of

language and time. This moment of ideal fusion between self and image is often

postulated as a mythical alpha point, an ur-beginning, from which all ideas of the race

or Volk derive. In an Irish republican context, for example, 1798 or 1916,[14] are such

moments which seem to transcend time; from the unionist perspective, 1691, the date

of the Battle of the Boyne, would be an analogous defining moment. Kevin Whelan

makes the point that Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic nationalism also appealed to selective

notions of history, ‘using an idealised past to destroy the decadent present’.[15]

However, such moments of fusion are also postulated as a goal towards which the

ethnie[16] should aim at some undefined time in the future. As we will see, the

discourse of nationalism abounds with variations of these two temporal imperatives, as

peoples look to regain a lost prelapsarian past, or else to come into their kingdom in

some golden futurity. In contemporary political discussion, this can be seen from a

particular choice of descriptive locution.

6
 Republican spokespeople constantly refer to ‘the Dublin government’ and ‘the

London government’ in their comments. These terms have become a commonplace in

the media, with both Irish and British broadcasters using them as norms. However,

some conceptual unpacking will reveal that these terms are part of the predefined

mirror image of the future that is central to republican epistemology. The term ‘Dublin

government’ is used in preference to the term ‘Irish government’ because it is seen as

an illegitimate state function which does not have jurisdiction over the ‘6 Occupied

Counties’ of Northern Ireland. The 32 County Sovereignty Committee makes this

point explicit by declaring ‘null and void any documents which usurp the sovereignty

of our nation as declared in the 1919 Declaration of Independence’.[17] In this context,

a two-dimensional image of Irishness from the past is seen as controlling all possible

future developments of Irishness in the future, a temporal schemata which is very much

in line with Lacan’s conception of the imaginary. Similarly, the ‘London government’

lacks legitimacy in the imaginary scheme precisely because it is the occupying force in

question in Northern Ireland, and will only be deemed ‘British’ when this occupation, a

temporal hiccup, is ended and ‘Ireland long a province’ can become ‘a nation once

again.’ Like the images of the reflected ‘ideal-I’, the ‘Ideal-Ireland’ is reified, or fixed,

allowing for no deviation from the temporal path set out in the imaginary mindset. Only

then will there be a legitimate ‘Irish’ government. The fact that Republican ideology is

suffused with personifications of Ireland as a mother figure is surely, in this context, no

accident. The use of racial, religious and linguistic tropes that are rooted in the

individual and group unconscious, gives nationalist ideology a strong hold on the minds

of its audience.

7
 In his study, ‘The Island of Ireland: a psychological contribution to political

psychology,’ Ernest Jones analyses the dominant image of a female personification of

Ireland in terms of how the signifier ‘Ireland’ has become particularly associated with an

‘unconscious maternal complex’ (Gallagher, 1988: 1).[18] Jones made the point that for

island peoples, the associations of their native land with the ideas of ‘woman, virgin,

mother and womb’ are very strong and he went on to add that such phantasies tend to

fuse ‘in the central complex of the womb of a virgin mother’.[19]

The many different names that have been given to a personified Ireland – Erin,

Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Banba, Mother Ireland, the Shan Van Vocht, the Poor Old

Woman[20] – tend to demonstrate the accuracy of Jones’s point, and I would largely

agree with Cormac Gallagher’s extrapolation from Jones’s thesis that, in the case of

Ireland, there is a strong connection between this personification and the ‘repressed

primary idea of Mother, the closest of all immediate blood relatives, to which powerful

unconscious affective interests remain attached’.[21] What this means, in effect, is that

the political has become mapped onto the familial, with the hugely affective and

emotional aspects of family relationships mapped onto political structures. In Defence of

the Nation, the ‘Newsletter of the 32 County Sovereignty Committee’, for example, we

find the following quotation in a section entitled ‘Where We Stand’, which enunciates

that organisations’s credo: ‘the committee seeks to achieve broad unity among the

republican family on the single issue of sovreignty’.[22] Here, the strong political and

ideological differences among different strands of republicanism have been transposed

into an internal family squabble, a rhetorical device which serves to naturalise republican

8
ideolgy into a familial norm, with Ireland personified as a mother. Here the elements of

choice, argument, debate and ideology are subsumed into a natualised familial dialectic.

Gallagher’s study points us in the direction of an answer to this complicated

question. Developing his point about the connection between the idea of Ireland and that

of a mother figure, he points out that if nationalists unconsciously connect their actions

with the ‘primary idea’ of the mother: ‘their thoughts and actions will have such a

compulsive force that no amount of reasoning or concessions will modify them’.[23] It is

here, I would contend, that we approach the main epistemological dimension of the

imaginaire. Lacan has identified desire as the most important human attribute, from the

perspective of the development of the human ego. I will argue that desire is precisely the

compulsive force, unconsciously driven, and oriented towards primary images and ideas,

which permeates and originates nationalist ideology. By an analysis of Lacan’s

paradigms of the mirror stage and the imaginary order, we can see, at an individual level,

the effects and dimensions of this desire on identity; and we can then go on to develop

this in terms of the group identity as predicated in the nationalist imaginaire. In the song

A Nation Once Again, this transposition from individual to group growth is framed within

this imaginary notion of teleological nationahood. The song begins when ‘boyhood’s

filer was in my blood’, and proceeds through a process of political and religious

development until manhood (‘and so I grew from boy to man’) is defined in terms of

participation in the creation of the once and future nation.

In Lacan’s account of the development of the ego, human identity is seen as

emerging from the crossing of a frontier, from what he terms the ‘imaginary order’ (the

dyadic world of mother and child), into that of the ‘symbolic order,’ which is concerned

9
with symbolic systems, language being the main one (though both stages continue to

coexist within the individual afterwards). The imaginary is defined as the ‘world, the

register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined’.[24]

Lacan’s notion of the imaginary order is one wherein the human being becomes attached

to an image, and attempts to find a wholeness and unity of meaning through a form of

imitation or mimicry of this image.

It is the idea of the ego as being fascinated, and ultimately fixated, by its image

that has such importance for our discussion of the modality of knowledge that is

operative in, and through, nationalism. Lacan seems to see such mimicry as constitutive

of our identity-generating process as humans. ‘the field of phantasies and images,’ with

its prototype being the ‘infant before the mirror, fascinated with his image’,[25] while

Gary Leonard, in his Lacanian study of James Joyce’s Dubliners, sees it in terms of a

‘period of time in which individuals mistake their mirror images for themselves, that is,

as proof that they are unified and autonomous beings’.[26] As Lacan himself puts it, the

imaginary is, at its core, an erotic relationship: ‘all seizing of the other in an image in a

relationship of erotic captivation, occurs by way of the narcissistic relation’.[27] Here, he

is pointing towards his theory of the importance of the image, or reflection, in the process

of identificatory development of the ego, which he defines as a form of construct of self

and image.

The important point to note about this identification is that the image is ideal, it

orients the ‘agency of the ego’ in a ‘fictional direction,’ it is something towards which the

ego may aspire, but which it can never attain. It is also an identification that has no place

for anything else outside of its scopic field. Lacan makes the point that the human ego is

10
created as a result of identifying with one’s own specular image, so what seems to be

individual, internal and unique to the individual is, in fact, the result of an identification

with a two-dimensional representation of that individual. Lacan’s point here is that the

ego is constituted: ‘by an identification with another whole object, an imaginary

projection, an idealisation (“Ideal-I”) which does not match the child’s feebleness.’ It is

this ‘alienated relationship of the self to its own image’ that Lacan terms the imaginary.

[28]

Nationalist narratives very often read as coherent and teleological, leading

cohesively from past to future. In this sense, Lacan’s notion of the future anterior is

important as history, rather than being a record of events of the past, becomes a temporal

mirror through which the nationalist imago is seen and reinforced: ‘the future anterior of

what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming’.[29] The wholeness of

the reflected image of the self becomes the goal of the ego. In the narrative of history,

this wholeness becomes the telos or goal. In a search for such wholeness and unity, as

Bhabha notes, the subject assumes a ‘discrete image which allows it to postulate a series

of equivalences, samenesses, identities, between the objects of the surrounding world’,

[30] and this brings us to the third area of delimitation. The driving force behind these

identities is what Bowie terms: ‘the false fixities of the imaginary order’.[31] The

imaginary order attempts to hypostasise (to fix in terms of underlying substance) and

hypertrophy (to enlarge in terms of one specific dimension) the specular image of itself,

and to block any development of this position of fixity: it is ‘tirelessly intent upon

freezing a subjective process that cannot be frozen’.[32] This prioritisation of the static

image, and the resultant imperative towards fixity in the viewing subject, necessitates

11
relationships in nationalist discourse which are unchanging and foundational. In an

attempt to remove itself from ‘the flux of becoming’,[33] the nationalist imaginaire

insists on identifications that are as permanent as it can find, with the most obvious of

these being the identification between a people and a place, between a language and a

land, as we saw in the motivated description of the ‘Dublin’ as opposed to the ‘Irish’

government.

The lococentric[34] relationship between a people and a place, the archetypal

nationalistic trope, is by its nature, imaginary because it is fictive. Stressing a

monological and temporal essentialism, it cannot cope with aspects of real society which

do not correspond to the ideal reflected image. The practices of cultural nationalism all

serve to create this mirror, this delusory dyad in which nothing else exists except this

specular definition of selfhood. The aggressivity that is a concomitant of narcissism, the

child expelling that which upsets the specular symmetry, is an inherent aspect of the

imaginary, and also, I would suggest, an inherent aspect of nationalism. All that is ‘other’

in terms of the imaginary selfhood must be expelled. Etymologically, the term ‘territory’

derives both from terra (earth) and terrére (to frighten) which leads, as Bhabha has

astutely pointed out, to territorium: ‘a place from which people are frightened off’.[35] If

the people-place relationship is to enact the dyadic nature of the nationalist imaginary,

then anything outside that dyadic scopic field must be elided.

In the establishment of the ego, as we have seen, the desire for some form of

identity is paramount. From infancy, we seek to be desired and loved by the ‘other,’ a

term which, as Mark Bracher notes, alters as we develop. Initially, at the beginning of

life, this designation refers to the ‘mother, then both parents, later one’s peers, and finally

12
any number of bodies or figures of authority, including God, Society and nature’.[36] In

many ways, it is the growth and development of our notion of the other that structures the

type of identity which we develop. If the other is allowed to remain static, if it becomes

hypostasised in an imaginary dyad, then this attenuation of the other will result in a

concomitant attenuation of the development of the self. These master signifiers also form

some of the points de capiton (anchoring points) which Lacan sees as necessary for

normal interaction within discourse.

For example, a specific narrative of the past can also be used as a binding factor

in this imaginary relationship, as witnessed by the rhetoric of the imaginary that is to be

found in the Green Book, the training manual of the Provisional IRA. Here, the imaginary

identification of a whole people with a minority movement is enacted through the

creation of a temporal master signifier which anchors a particular reading of Irish history:

Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both
military and political is morally justified, that war is morally justified and that the
Army is the direct representatives [sic] of the 1918 Dáil Éireann parliament, and that
as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the
moral right to pass laws for, and claim jurisdiction over, the whole geographical
fragment of Ireland...and all of its people regardless of creed or loyalty.[37]

This is the discourse of nationalism par excellence, embodying its imaginary

epistemology. Time is frozen in a specular identification with the ‘Dáil of 1918,’ a term

which is a point de capiton in Irish republican narrative.[38] All subsequent elections and

democratic expressions of will are null and void; they do not correspond to the totalising

image and must therefore be deemed invalid. All territory and people, ‘regardless of

loyalty or creed,’ are claimed as part of the nationalist imaginary; the chilling question of

exactly what is to be done with those whose loyalty is not to the Dáil of 1918 being left

unasked and unanswered. Here, the master signifier sets limits to the development of the

13
other in the discourse of Irish nationalism. The development of which Bracher spoke is

stunted. Instead, the passive narcissistic desire (the desire to be the object of the other’s

love, idealisation or recognition)[39] of the addressees of this document (IRA members),

is fixed on an other which defines itself in terms of the election in 1918. This is also the

position of the 32 County Sovereignty Committee, whose whole raison d’être is

predicated on this particular point in time: ‘This committee solely stands to uphold the

Declaration of Independence as proclaimed by Dail Eireann on January 21st 1919’.[40]

Another master signifier in the above declaration is the term ‘belief.’ Here there is

to be no rational debate, or attempt to win over opponents through force of argument.

Instead, all that is necessary is that one should believe in the moral right of the IRA to

carry out its political and military actions. As Renan has noted, nationality has a

sentimental side to it: ‘it is both soul and body at once; a Zollverein is not a patrie’.[41]

In terms of the song A Nation Once Again, this pattern of the language of belief and

religion is a central trope. The chain of religious imagery, which I cite seriatim, functions

as a narrative spine within the song:

And then I prayed I might yet see

Our fetters rent in twain….
….Outshine that solemn starlight
It seemed to watch above my head
In forum, field and fane
Its angel voice sang round my bed….
….It whispered too that freedoms ark
And service high and holy….
…..For, freedom comes from God’s right hand
And needs a godly train
and righteous men must make our land
A nation once again….

Belief in the nation as an almost sacral manifestation is a central tenet. If one believes in

the nation, in the cause, then all further action is legitimated by this belief – the

epistemological structure operative here is that of a dyad, the ‘I’ of the song believes in

14
the nation that is to come, and that nation, in turn, validates and legitimate’s the growth

of the self in the song from ‘boyhood’ to adulthood: ‘as I grew from boy to man’.

Here, then, is the epistemology of the republican imaginaire: a misrecognition, a

méconaissance, in which self and image cohere to the exclusion of all others. According

to Lacan, the ego is constructed as the child struggles to achieve the specular image of

wholeness that is observed in the mirror; an image:

that is both accurate (since it is an inverted reflection, the presence of light rays
emanating from the child: the image as icon); as well as delusory (since the image
prefigures a unity and mastery that the child still lacks).[42]

For Lacan, this specular relationship initiates the imaginary order where the self is

dominated by an image of the self, and it seeks definition through reflected relations with

this image. The nationalistic ethnie is forever gazing towards a specular image that is

fictional, optative (as in expressing a wish or desire) and of necessity, a source of

aggressive impulses when it cannot be internalised. In this specular dyad, there is no

place for a developing, growing ‘other,’ as outlined by Bracher. Instead, the specular

image is fixed in a two-dimensional realm, and all three-dimensional changes which blur

the purity of this image are alien, and must be purged.

This imaginary reflection is the driving force behind all nationalistic discursive

formulations. Thus, the deistic sceptical Enlightenment thinker, Wolfe Tone, is

captated[43] by the nationalist imaginary into a quasi-Catholic martyr, who died for his

people in a salvific act of redemption. For the IRA, the ebb and flow of the signifying

chain of Irish history is punctuated by a temporal master signifier – the 1918 Dáil Éireann

parliament – which renders insignificant and meaningless all prior and subsequent

electoral contests and democratic processes. When these refuse to validate the imaginary

15
nationalistic vision of Ireland embodied in the 1918 Dáil, they are simply elided from the

historical narrative structure. As Lacan tellingly put it: ‘history is not the past. History is

the past in so far as it is historicised in the present’,[44] and the ideological and emotive

elements which govern this historicisation are those of the nationalist imaginaire.

Hence, the image of a subject being captated by a reflection, which is both

idealised and at the same time frozen, is a paradigm for the identificatory processes of

nationalism. The captation of the child by his or her reflection is an analogue of the

captation of a people by their nationalist mirror-image. The dual nature of the scopic field

between an ethnie and the projection of its identity is central to nationalism. That there is

no third party in this scopic bijection is another cogent factor. The identification is

mutually fulfilling: there is no room for anything or anyone else. Such is the mindset of

the IRA declaration which sees itself as having: ‘the moral right to pass laws for, and

claim jurisdiction over, the whole geographical fragment of Ireland.’ Here we see a

fusion of territory with a notion of religious warrant, as an essentially political movement

expresses itself in terms that are profoundly religious in tenor: ‘belief...moral right.’ The

specular imaginary deals with identities that exist outside of its scopic field in an

acquisitive way: the IRA here encompasses ‘all of its [Ireland’s] people regardless of

creed or loyalty’.[45] The choice for any other form of identity existing outside the

nationalist imaginary is simple: leave the territory, or else be absorbed into the nationalist

mentaliteé.

Lacan has made the point that: ‘[d]esidero is the Freudian cogito’,[46] and has

stressed the primacy of desire as a motive force in the construction of our humanity. Such

desire is central to the creation of the nationalist and republican imaginaire. If there is to

16
be a core definition of nationalism qua nationalism then surely it must focus on the mode

of creation of the ethnic group, or on the methods used in imagining the identity of the

community in question, or on the rhetorical and suasive strategies used in terms of

creating nationalistic sentiment. The modality of these creations or inventions, what

Anderson terms ‘the style in which they are imagined’,[47] is crucial if we are to come to

any understanding of how nationalism utters and fashions itself. To quote Bennington: at

‘the origin of the nation, we find a story of the nation’s origin’,[48] and there can be no

doubting that this reflexive form of narrative is an important constituent of the

epistemology of nationalism. Narratives create the myths of nationalism, and these are

both protean and similar in that they feature a telling to the self of the self, a telling

which, in the process, is performative in that it is creative of that self, at both conscious

and unconscious levels.

Bennington’s focus on narrative, I think, allows us to overcome the antinomies

already observed in terms of the problematics of defining nationalism. Every culture

defines itself through a process of narrative imagination, a re-telling of stories about its

own past which reaffirms the ritual unities of the culture in question. For example, Irish

people remember the 1916 Easter rebellion as a nodal or central point in the political and

cultural reaffirmation of Irishness per se. Around this period, and for some time before,

the major political parties, or their precursors, were founded, and the Gaelic, Celtic, Irish

Language and Irish Literary revivals were set in motion. The Gaelic League and the

Gaelic Athletic Association were set up, and the gradual adequation between the

nationalist movement, both political and cultural, and the Catholic church came into

being. This period of colonial upheaval – with the almost standard attendant processes of

17
nationalist consciousness-raising, independence movement, armed rebellion, war of

independence/liberation and an ensuing civil war – became part of the process of a

national imaginary, defining Irishness as it emerged from the colonial shadow of Britain.

This whole period, or more correctly, the narrative enculturation of this period, became a

nodal point, or point de capiton from which particular notions of Irishness were traced.

Such a process is necessary for cultural definition, but there is always a danger

that such culturally sanctioned categories may become reified into some form of

epistemological orthodoxy which forms a hypostasised centre of identity. As Richard

Kearney has noted, such a process of ‘ideological recollection of sacred foundational acts

often serves to integrate and legitimate a social order’.[49] However, he goes on to cite a

warning note sounded by Paul Ricoeur, who points out that such a process of

reaffirmation can be perverted ‘into a mystificatory discourse which serves to uncritically

vindicate or glorify the established political powers.’ Ricoeur’s point is essentially that in

such instances the symbols of a community become fixed and fetishised; they serve as

lies’.[50] Ricoeur has noted that imagination can function as two opposite poles. At one

pole is the confusion of myth with reality brought about by a ‘non-critical consciousness’

which conflates the two into a societal ‘given.’ At the other end of the axis, where

‘critical distance is fully conscious of itself,’ ‘imagination is the very instrument of the

critique of reality,’ because it enables ‘consciousness to posit something at a distance

from the real and thus produce the alterity at the very heart of existence’ (Kearney, 1998:

147).[51]

I would argue that the narrative structure of nationalism is clearly allied to

Ricoeur’s initial pole, that of the confusion of myth with reality through a ‘non-critical

18
consciousness.’ Such a narrative structure functions mainly at an unconscious level in

culture and society, creating structural effects in terms of ethnic and racial stereotypes.

Logic, reason and critical thinking allow us to discriminate between the value of stories

as fictions, and their constative, or truth-telling status. However, by functioning at an

unconscious level, through formal and informal apparatuses of communication, narratives

and myths create a powerful drive, through which nationalist ideology can be

disseminated. They create an imaginary selfhood which is reflected back into society as

an ideal form of identity.

The stock example of such a process is Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but there are

multifarious examples to be found of the unconscious effect of narratives that are

uncritically equated with constative discourse. In an Irish context,[52] perhaps the locus

classicus of this type of nationalist narrative operating at a pre-critical, unconscious level

is Patrick Pearse’s rewriting of the history of the United Irish rebellion of 1798. Pearse

was a central figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a sub-grouping within the Irish

Volunteers, who organised a rebellion against the British Government in 1916.[53] In his

efforts to create a narrative of nationalist resistance to British rule in Ireland, Pearse

specifically set out to ‘remember’ the 1798 rebellion in highly specific terms.

The 1798 rebellion was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone.[54] Tone, a product of the

French Enlightenment, had little time for religion, and saw the aim of his organisation,

The United Irishmen, as the creation of a country where the terms Protestant, Catholic

and Dissenter would be subsumed under the common name of Irishman.[55] Tone

himself, as Marianne Elliott has observed, was a deist, ‘who disliked institutionalised

religion and sectarianism of any hue.’ More importantly in the present context, she makes

19
the point that, based on his writings, he had ‘no time whatsoever for the romantic

Gaelicism that has become part of Irish nationalism’.[56] Hence, if Pearse wished to

create a seamless narrative wherein Tone was a historical nationalist avatar, and a

Pearsean precursor, he would seem to have some factual historical difficulties with which

to contend.

His response to these difficulties is a classic exemplum of what I have termed

nationalist epistemology. In an oration given at the grave of Tone, in Bodenstown,

County Kildare, in 1913, Pearse enfolded Tone in the following narrative structure:

We have come to one of the holiest places in Ireland; holier even than the place
where Patrick sleeps in Down.[57] Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us.
He was the greatest of Irish Nationalists.…We have come to renew our adhesion to
the faith of Tone: to express once more our full acceptance of the gospel of Irish
Nationalism which he was the first to formulate in worldly terms. This man’s soul
was a burning flame, so ardent, so generous, so pure, that to come into communion
with it is to come unto a new baptism, into a new regeneration and cleansing.[58]

Here there is no attempt to commemorate the historical Wolfe Tone, the ‘child of the

eighteenth-century Enlightenment’ whose hope was that Enlightenment rationality would

supplant what he regarded as ‘superstitious beliefs’.[59] Instead, Tone is suasively

captated into Pearse’s own vision of Irish history. It is not accidental that Anderson has

noted a ‘strong affinity’ between nationalist and religious imaginings.[60] Indeed, he has

made the valid point that the dawn of the age of nationalism coincides with the dusk of

religious thought,[61] as both tend to work with some form of ‘sacred text.’ The notion of

a sacred text is important here, as the response to such a text is not that of close reading,

or of some form of rational critical engagement; rather is it an acceptance, a belief, and a

ready acknowledgement of the ‘truth’ that is revealed by this text.

20
 His frame of reference is directed at an audience whose unconscious is saturated

with Roman Catholic religiosity. The rhetorical device polyptoton[62] is used to cement

the adequation of Tone with Saint Patrick in the opening line. This adequation transforms

Tone from an historical figure, subject to the veridical discourse of history, into a

mythico-religious one, comparable to the legendary Saint Patrick, about whom

comparatively little is known, apart from his spectacular religious success. The

connection between the two, the hinge upon which the whole rhetorical structure turns, is

based on this lococentric comparison in terms of the holiness of a specific place. This

connection is then developed in the contradiction that while Patrick ‘brought us life,’ a

phrase which clearly implies religious life, Tone ‘died for us.’ By now, the adequation

has done its work, and the unconscious religious background fills in any blanks in the

narrative. In Catholic teaching, the notion of sacrifice, the one for the many, is a central

tenet. The adequation between Tone and Saint Patrick is now elided and a stronger

connection is set up. Given the religious frame of reference (reinforced by the lexical

field of the paragraph: ‘faith’; gospel’; ‘soul’; ‘communion’; ‘baptism’; ‘regeneration’;

‘cleansing’), the notion of someone dying ‘for us’ implies an adequation between Tone

and Christ, and at a broader level, between nationalism and religion.

For Pearse, and we must keep in mind his notion of Tone as the first to formulate

in worldly terms the gospel of Irish nationalism, there is something quasi-sacred about

the nation. Régis Debray, in an attempt to study the constituent factors of the historical

nation-state, has traced, in nationalism, the process whereby ‘life itself is rendered

untouchable or sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question’.[63]

The teleology of Pearse’s rhetorical transformation of the people into their own Messiah

21
is to render them ‘immortal and impassable.’ Nationalistic selfhood creates a people, a

Volk, which transcends time and death. The religious overtones of this message, allied to

strong unconscious influences, combine to create a linguistic and suasive dimension to

the epistemology of nationalism which can never be fully examined in any analysis

which is not grounded in literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytic techniques. This, I would

argue, is why the already discussed definitions will always fail to analyse the workings

and imperatives of nationalism. It is only by looking at its modality of expression, and its

epistemological status, that we can come to clearer perceptions about its nature.

Let us observe Pearse on the steps of the General Post Office in the centre of

Dublin on Easter Monday 1916, when he inscribes his act of rebellion against the British

under the rubric of a nationalistic, rhetorical reading of Irish history:

Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from
which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her
children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.[64]

Through the use of a rhetorical structure largely underpinned by transcendental imagery,

Pearse avoids the discourse of reason or of political debate, and instead appeals to the

unconscious signification of the powerful images of ‘God,’ the ‘dead generations’ and the

notion of Ireland as a mother, calling her children to her flag.

The phantasy invoked here is telling. As Easthope has noted, phantasy turns ideas

into narratives,[65] and the proclamation of a provisional government, while

encapsulating a certain social doctrine: (universal suffrage, and guarantees of ‘religious

and civil liberty, equal rites and equal opportunities to all its citizens’),[66] is largely

premised on a narrative structure which creates and defines selfhood in its own terms.

Keeping in mind his notion of the people as their own messiah, it is noteworthy that the

22
proclamation concludes by stressing the sacrificial, and ultimately salvific, nature of this

struggle. He concludes:

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God,
Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that
cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the
Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by the readiness of its children to
sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny
to which it is called.[67]

The unconscious, pre-critical element that I maintain is a central tenet of the

epistemology of nationalism, is evident here through close reading. The proclamation

seems to come to a logical conclusion. Pearse’s prayer is that the Irish nation must prove

itself worthy of the ‘august destiny’ to which it is called, and this seems to make the act

of rebellion almost preordained. Of course, on looking back to the beginning of the

proclamation, we find that it is ‘through us,’[68] namely the splinter group within the

Irish Volunteers, who defied their own command structure in order to undertake the

Rising, that the personified notion of Ireland initially summoned ‘her children to her flag’

and struck ‘for her freedom.’[69] Consequently, the seemingly impersonal ‘august

destiny’ is, in fact, part of a suasive rhetorical device which exemplifies the circularity

and reflexivity of nationalist epistemology. The ‘we’ who are called into service as the

children of a personified Ireland, are the very ‘we’ who have personified that notion of

Ireland in the first place. In terms of an imaginary scene, which is altered in order to fulfil

a wish for the subject, this whole exercise can be described as a locus classicus of

phantasy, a phantasy which is constitutive in terms of defining the national subjectivity in

question. This, in turn, produces an alteration from the communal and socially structured

relationships of politics into the natural and organic relationships of the family: it is not a

case of politically inspired revolutionaries deciding to fight for social or ideological aims,

23
instead, it is children coming to the defence of their mother, an act which in itself requires

neither explanation nor warrant.

The suasive and rhetorical effect of this process, when repeated, is to allow a

linguistic performative to achieve a constative function. Here, myth and reality are fused

in a nationalist imaginaire, and the mutual reflection of one in the other combines to

create a narrative structure which is impervious to the conventions of political and

veridical discourse. This narrative structure is also constitutive of what we might term

nationalist identity, given that it reflects a particular type of subjectivity that is deemed to

be Irish. No matter how much evidence of Wolfe Tone’s attitude to religion is

instantiated in biographies, he is still seen as part of a Catholic, Gaelic, nationalist

pantheon, as narrated by Pearse, and it is to his grave in Bodenstown that the Provisional

IRA have trooped in pilgrimage every year. The fact that their sectarian murder campaign

over the past thirty years was the antithesis of everything that Tone stood for, is not seen

as any impediment to this process. What Pearse has been attempting is a narrative which

will create trans-rational, unconscious, ethnic bonds between the past and the present.

The facts of history are not part of such a discourse; they are only of value in selected

instances, and if they reinforce the agenda of the narrative: they are creative of an

identification, they are creative of an ‘us.’

However, such valorisation or validation is actually defined relationally inasmuch

as essentialist characteristics are actually predicated on a difference from otherness. For

there to be an ‘us,’ then there must be a ‘them’ who are, by definition different from ‘us.’

This definition of the self promotes a desire for racial, linguistic, ideological, territorial

and cultural purity which, at one end of the spectrum, validates a desire for socio-cultural

24
identification and self-definition, and at the other, posits a desire to differentiate one’s

own group from others, and by extension, a related desire to keep other groupings outside

one’s native territory, be that territory actual or psychic, and be that desire conscious or

unconscious.

The Ulster loyalist, for example, believes that he or she is British, and that Ulster

(comprising six counties, since partition in 1922), as a political entity, is stable and

viable. The Ulster republican, on the other hand, refuses to recognise the state of

Northern Ireland, and instead sees Ulster (nine counties, part of the original quinary

provincial divisions of Ireland), as part of the whole island of Ireland. The leader of the

Orange march at Drumcree, during the summer of 1996, believed that even as these

marchers defied the legal ban imposed by Sir Hugh Annesley, the Chief Constable of the

RUC (the Royal Ulster Constabulary), he was obeying some higher notion of

‘Britishness,’ and was able to invoke the Queen in support of the actions of his followers

and himself: ‘we are the Queen’s subjects, who wish to walk the Queen’s highway.’[70]

If the Queen of England is the titular head of the British legislature, then, by

extension, the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is acting in her interests

and at her behest through the British parliament at Westminster. From a logical or

rational perspective, his enforcement of the law regarding the prohibition of parades from

marching in a particular locality is validated by British legal and governmental writ. To

claim that by breaking the Queen’s law, one is, in some way demonstrating a higher form

of loyalty to that Queen, is patently absurd. But of course, as we have seen in the case of

Pearse, nationalist narrative is performative as opposed to constative, and this claim of a

higher loyalty validates the Orange Order’s sense of itself as some form of latter-day

25
chosen people, who are proclaiming a ‘true’ notion of ‘Britishness’ that only they can

understand. Just as Pearse saw Tone as formulating the ‘gospel of Irish Nationalism in

worldly terms,’ so the Orange Order sees itself as revealing the ‘truth’ about notions of

loyalism and Britishness in a similar manner.

The militant Republicans who bombed Omagh in the Summer of 1998, similarly

believed that their action would in some way facilitate the coming into being of a united

Ireland. While claiming that it is non-sectarian, the IRA, in all its manifestations, has

pursued overtly sectarian policies, by targeting people and premises purely on the basis

that they are Protestant, and by extension, unionist and loyalist in political persuasion.

[71] Both traditions blend religion and politics, seeing their own creed as true and the

other as heretical, and both traditions express their respective identities through a matrix

of cultural signifiers: murals, graffiti, songs and icons, a matrix which is constitutive of

powerful identificatory unconscious phantasies.[72]

If this type of politically motivated violence is to be removed from an Irish

context, thee is a need for a clear understanding of the nature of republicanism in a

specifically Irish context. I would argue that Irish republicanism is very different from

that of France or the United States in that it is a more essentialist political formulation,

with none of the philosophical enquiry that underpinned the French and American

revolutions. In terms of its mode of knowledge, of how it sees itself and its place in

contemporary culture, Irish republicanism exemplifies all of the tenets of the Lacanian

imaginaire, and only by progressing towards a more fluid definition of selfhood and

alterity will it ever be able to acknowledge change and diversity as possible benefits to a

changing dialectic. With the advent of Sinn Fein in the political spectrum of both

26
Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an advent which offers de facto recognition

of the legitimacy of both states, and by definition of the position of the Ulster Unionist

population, some measure of progress has been achieved. If that is to be maintained the

idea of a nationhood that is temporally bound in the past and future anterior must give

way to a more fluid concept, a concept that is enshrined in a different epistemology of

Irishness, as enunciated by Daniel O’Connell: ‘No man has the right to set a boundary to

the onward march of a nation. No man has the right to say: ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and

no further.’ This perspective on Irishness is one which the republican needs to embrace if

it is ever to develop beyond the republican imaginaire.

A NATION ONCE AGAIN

I
When boyhoods fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood
Three hundred men and three men
And then I prayed I might yet see
Our fetters rent in twain
And Ireland long a province be
A nation once again
CHORUS
A nation once again
A nation once again
And Ireland long a province be
A nation once again
II
And from that time through wildest woe
That hope has shone a far light
Nor could loves brightest summer glow
Outshine that solemn starlight
It seemed to watch above my head
In forum, field and fane
Its angel voice sang round my bed
A nation once again
III
It whispered too that freedoms ark
And service high and holy
Would be profaned by feelings dark
And passions vain or lowly

27
For, freedom comes form Gods right hand
And needs a godly train
And righteous men must make our land
A nation once again
IV
So, as I grew from boy to man
I bent me to that bidding
My spirit of each selfish plan
And cruel passion ridding
For, thus I hoped some day to aid
Oh, can such hope be vain
When my dear country shall be made
A nation once again.

ENDNOTES

[1] J.Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce, James (1993) A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. Edited by R.B. Kershner. (Boston [First published 1916], p.177.
[2] Jacques Lacan, Écrits - A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), pp. 1-7.
[3] The term ‘specular image’ is specific to the work of Jacques Lacan and refers to the image
that the child sees of itself in the mirror. By definition, it will be a two-dimensional
representation of a three-dimensional object
[4] Lacan, Écrits, p.2.
[5] Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis.
Translated by Michael Levine (Cambridge, 1991), p.12.
[6] Lacan, Écrits, p.86.
[7] Weber, Return to Freud, p.9.
[8] This term, introduced into psychoanalysis by Jung, is related to the notion of the image, but
refers to the affective domain as well in that it stresses the subjectivity of the image by
including feelings.
[9] Lacan, Écrits, p.2.
[10] Madan Sarup, Jacques Lacan (Hemel Hempsted, 1992), p.66.
[11] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique
1953-1954. Jacques-Alain Miller, (ed.). Translated by John Forrester (New York, 1988),
p.170.
[12] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Translated by Barbara Bray (Cambridge, 1997),
p.143.
[13] Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London, 1990), pp.46-7.
[14] 1798 was the year in which the United Irishmen and the Defenders rebelled against British
rule, under the leadership of Wolfe Tone. 1916 was the date of the Easter Rising, a
rebellion carried out by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Citizen Army and

28
 Cumann na mBan (the Women’s Army), under the leadership of Patrick Pearse and James
Connolly in Easter week of that year.
[15] Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish
Identity 1760-1830. Critical Conditions Series (Cork, 1996), p.55.
[16] See John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism; Anthony D Smith, The Ethnic Origins
of Nations and Fredrik Barth, Introduction in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Smith looks
at the intrinsic meaning given to cultural practices, myths and symbols by ethnic
communities which he terms ethnies. In both definitions, the ethnie is seen as an organic
community, wherein social, cultural, religious and ideological practices cohere in a
synthesis which promotes self-definition.
[17] Defence of the Nation (1998) ‘Newsletter of the 32 County Sovereignty Committee’,
volume 1, number 3, p.2.
[18] Cormac Gallagher makes the point that this essay was first read at a particularly important
time in Irish history. Jones’s paper was delivered to the British Psychological Society on
June 21st 1922, as the Irish War of Independence was gradually being transformed into the
Civil War. ‘ “Ireland, Mother Ireland”: an essay in psychoanalytic symbolism’, The Letter,
Issue 12 Spring 1998, pp.1-14.
[19] Ernest Jones, ‘The Island of Ireland: a psychological contribution to political psychology’,
in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis (London, 1964), p.196.
[20] Eugene O’Brien, The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and
James Joyce (Lampeter, 1998), p.221.
[21] Gallagher, Mother Ireland, pp.4-5.
[22] Defence of the Nation, 1998, volume 1, number 3, p.2.
[23] Gallagher, Mother Ireland, pp.8-9.
[24] Alan Sheridan, Translator’s note to Jacques Lacan’s Écrits - A Selection. (London, 1977),
p.ix.
[25] Bice Benvenuto, and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986), p.81.
[26] Gary M. Leonard, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective (New York, 1983),
p.188.
[27] Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, 1955-1956.
Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Translated by Russell Grigg (London, 1993), pp.92-3.
[28] Sarup, Lacan, p.66.
[29] Lacan, Écrits, p.86.
[30] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p.77.
[31] Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London, 1991), p.99.
[32] Bowie, Lacan, p.25.
[33] Bowie, Lacan, p.92.
[34] This term is a coinage drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of logocentrism as an
epistemology centred on a particular notion of language and reason. It attempts to give

29
 expresion to a notion of identity that is focused in the centrality of very specific view of
place.
[35] Bhabha cites The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, volume II, 215 for
this definition. Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp.94-5.
[36] Mark Bracher, Lacan, Discourse and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism
(Ithaca, 1993), p.24.
[37] Brendan O’Brien, The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Féin from Armed Struggle to Peace
Talks (Dublin, 1993), p.350.
[38] This term refers to certain anchoring points that are necessary for meaning to be generated,
and these are what Lacan terms points de capiton, the ‘minimal number of fundamental
points of insertion between the signifier and the signified for a human being to be called
normal’ (Lacan Seminar, Book 3, pp.268-9). These points are where the ‘signifier stops the
otherwise endless movement of signification’ (Lacan, Écrits, p.303).
[39] Bracher, Lacan, p.20.
[40] Defence of the Nation: ‘Newsletter of the 32 County Sovereignty Committee’, 1998,
volume 1, number 4.
[41] In his translator’s notes, Martin Thom explains the term Zollverein as the German term for
a customs union.
[42] Grosz, Lacan, p.39.
[43] The term ‘captate’ is a neologism coined by the French psychoanalysts Édouard Pichon
and Odile Codet. It derives from the French verb ‘capter’ and has the double sense
‘capture’ and ‘captivate’: of the image as a captivating, seductive force as well as one
which is capable of capturing and imnprisoning the subject in a one-dimensional line of
thought or ideology.
[44] Lacan, Seminar, Book 1, p.12.
[45] O’Brien, IRA, p.350.
[46] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1977), p.154.
[47] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London, 1991), p.6.
[48] Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation’, in Homi K Bhabha
(ed.) Nation and Narration (London, 1990), p.121.
[49] Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern. Edinburgh. 1998), p.166.
[50] Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by C. Regan and D. Stewart
(Boston, 1973), p.29.
[51] Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, p.147. I have taken this quote from Richard Kearney’s
translation of ‘L’imagination dans le discours et dans l’action.’ I can think of no better
introduction to the work of Ricoeur than Kearney’s Modern Movements in European
Philosophy. Two of Kearney’s other books, Poetics of Modernity and Poetics of

30
 Imagination contain excellent discussions of Ricoeur’s work, as well as contextual
placements of that work in terms of contemporary critical debate.
[52] Here, I would cite the caveat mentioned by Benedict Anderson in the acknowledgements to
Imagined Communities, where he notes that his own academic training, specialisation in
Southeast Asia, accounts for ‘some of the book’s biases and choices of examples’
(Anderson 1991, ix). My own academic specialisation is in the area of Irish Studies, so this
will, similarly, account for many of my own choices of examples, as well as for some of
the biases in the book.
[53] Perhaps the best available biography of Pearse is by Ruth Dudley Edwards, and is entitled
The Triumph of Failure.
[54] Marianne Elliott’s Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence, is an excellent biography of
Tone, and the monumental Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, compiled by his son William T.
W. Tone, and edited by Thomas Bartlett, has been reissued by Lilliput Press.
[55] O’Brien, Irish Identity, p.66.
[56] Marianne Elliot, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven, 1989), p.1.
[57] This reference is to Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
[58] Patrick Pearse, Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches. 5
volumes (Dublin, 1917-22), volume 2, p.58.
[59] Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin,
1994), p.100.
[60] Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.10.
[61] Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.11.
[62] The repetition of a word with varying grammatical inflections.
[63] Régis Debray, ‘Marxism and the National Question’. New left review, 105 (September-
October), 1977, pp.25-41, p.26.
[64] Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (Dublin, 1990), p.280.
[65] Anthony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge, 1989), p.11.
[66] Dudley Edwards, Triumph of Failure, p.281.
[67] Dudley Edwards, Triumph of Failure, p.281.
[68] It is possible that this construction, ‘through us,’ is a conscious or unconscious homage to
the Great Doxology for the Mass Liturgy: ‘through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of
the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever.’
[69] For a comprehensive bibliography of the 1916 Rising, and issues associated with it, see
Dudley Edwards, 363-369.
[70] This exchange was recorded on the BBC1 news on July 12th, 1996.

31